The won thing: celebrating Shaun Tan

Forget Natalie Portman, Colin Firth and The King’s Speech. The Oscar win everyone should be talking about is The Lost Thing’s win for best short animation.  There’s a particular rabbit-shaped place in my heart for Australian picture book illustrator and Lost Thing creator Shaun Tan. So this morning, when I heard he’d won, I gave myself a little high five and pulled some of his books down to re-examine them and wonder at his creative genius.

If you want to wonder at them yourself – or at least wonder at some of his works of mechanical, architectural and zoological fantasy – noodle over to http://www.shauntan.net. For me, while The Lost Thing (the book on which his Oscar winning short is based) is both intriguing and beautiful, Tan’s two best works are The Arrival and The Rabbits.

The Arrival really is a picture book. Using not a word throughout, it tells the story of an immigrant leaving his family and home to journey to a new land. Tan’s fantastical creatures and buildings are at their most effective, showing how much of a stranger in a strange land, how lost and uncertain the Arrival feels in his new country.

In The Rabbits Tan provides the illustrations for Tomorrow When the War Began author John Marsden’s text.  The Rabbits is really an allegory for the colonisation of Australia and Tan’s illustrations give Marsden’s words real power. Make sure you’re sitting down when you get to the page with the words ‘and they stole our children’. 

Social media mooch round-up

Mooching around social media sites and other book blogs this week I've caught me these links:

1.    On my to-read list: Swamplandia! and People of Paper
2.    Reading the Oscar nominees like a book
3.    Rubber duckie, you're the one...
4.    iPrince of Denmark... Hamlet's playlist
5.    Extracting odd titles: Managing a Dental Practice: The Genghis Kahn Way 

Escaping escapism, the brilliant, the clear and the erudite: The Shia Revival

‘You should read this’, my brother-in-law said, pointing to his well-thumbed copy of Vali Nasr’s The Shia Revival: How Conflicts within Islam Will Shape the Future. I knew, even before he said it that he was right, I should. The book had ‘The New York Times Bestseller’ stamped across the top in a font small enough, and tasteful enough, to ensure it wouldn’t be mistaken for a less serious sort of bestseller. On its back cover a number of prominent commentators were quoted, saying things like ‘brilliant, clear and erudite’.

I knew I should read it, but I was fairly certain I wouldn’t. It looked a bit hard and no matter how much I’d like to think I’m the sort of person who reads ‘brilliant, clear and erudite’ books, unfortunately I’m a bit slippery when it comes to non-fiction. Characters and plot matter to me and I often give the non-fiction section in bookshops the cold shoulder. I tell myself that without a storyline I won’t retain the information a book has to offer. This is, it turns out, itself fiction – a self-spun story to excuse my slightly escapist reading habits.

Two years after my brother-in-law recommended it, I reluctantly pulled the copy of The Shia Revival he’d left with us from the bookshelf. He was right, it is a book that should be read. It gives what I can only describe as an, ahem, ‘brilliant, clear and erudite’ explanation of the sectarian differences within Islam: who the Sunnis and Shiites are, what they believe respectively and how that has led to conflict both historically and recently. Stuff I didn’t know. Stuff I’m embarrassed not to have known and stuff that, when relayed to my Dad as information I hadn’t known, made him shake his head in disbelief. He didn’t call me an eejit, but perhaps he should have.

And all of this stuff is told in such a way to make it thoroughly digestible – there are plenty of anecdotes (keeping my thirst for story-telling sated) and plenty of footnote referenced detail. In many ways the book is a history of the Middle East, Vali Nasr explains the differences in Islam that arose after the prophet Muhammad’s death (put far too simply, Sunnis and Shiites differ in who they believe was Muhammad’s rightful successor); the wax and wane of secular Arab nationalism; Iran under Ayatollah Khomeini; and the political and religious workings within Iraq post Saddam Hussein. Iraq has a Shia majority but the Sunni minority or secular Ba’athists, for a long time, held most of the power. The changes brought about by the US invasion in 2003, Nasr argues have paved the way for a new Middle East and a potential shift, or shifts, in the balance of power between Sunnis and Shiites. All issues I’m ill-equipped to describe – and in many ways I feel I have little right to review a book that does describe them. For a properly equipped review, I’d recommend the New York Times review (it is, remember, their bestseller).

I should have read it back in 2008. It’s now slightly out of date: the edition I have was published in 2007 and things have moved quickly. An additional chapter covering the last three years would be helpful. But the explanation of the differences between Sunnis and Shiites alone has gone a long way to helping me watch and read about recent events in the Middle East, with a better understanding of the region. Glued to Al Jazeera over the past weeks, I’ve watched reports on the Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings and in particular reports on unrest in Bahrain, where a Shia majority population is ruled by a Sunni monarchy, and thought I probably owe my brother-in-law a belated thank you.

First top list for the Year of the Rabbit

A Friday top ten (five was too tricky). Book-related news and websites from the week: 

1. The New York Times reading list for the Egypt crisis
2. Dating experience or pithy reads? Kindle Singles launched
3. Surprise best-seller: US federal Financial Crisis Inquiry Report sells out of first print run
4. Eau du sexy librarian
5. Gatsby gets the Strictly Ballroom treatment
6. Ten PM Question wins 2011 Margaret Mahy Medal
7. Gossip Girl meets American Psycho 
8. Two dimensional: Rumsfeld's memoir or Britney Spears' comic book biography? 
9. Hot dogs for Plath: famous author doodles
10. And because Valentine's Day is (almost) upon us, some vintage rrrrrrrromance covers

And it hasn't escaped me that Chinese New Year is upon us. In celebration I'm pulling Wild Swans from the shelf.  I've been meaning to read it for quite some time. And the time, it seems, is the Year of the Rabbit.

The Finkler Question: judging the Booker by its cover

I’ve got something like another 1170 books to read over the next forty-five years. I admit that I’ve made that projection based on a few loose ideas. It presupposes that several things will come to pass: the predictions of a fortune-teller who told my seven year old self I’d live to 75; that I’ll continue to read, on average, a book a fortnight; and a probably naïve assumption that reading, in something like its current format, is an activity people will continue to do – that eBook sales having surpassed paperback sales on Amazon, as is currently being reported all over the media – won’t in turn be surpassed by sales of some sort of information chip we’ll all have inserted into our elbows or under our eyelids or up our nostrils.

But pretend we’re on stable ground here and that my projection is likely.  1170… it’s quite a big number. But it’s still only a fraction of all the books available to be read. Last year Google projected (and I’m fairly confident they didn’t rely on any palm-reading or crystal ball gazing to come up with their number) that there were 129,864,880 books out there in the world. So if all publishing had stopped last year when Google made their projection, with my 1170 books, I would only ever be able to read 0.000009 per cent of the whole. As it is, publishers continue to release new titles and so my little fraction, as each year slips by, will become smaller and smaller. What’s my point? Even though I have a lot of books to choose, there are so many more to choose from. I’d like to minimise my future fractiousness by using my fraction for good – well for my own good. On good books, as I judge them.

Generally I choose what I’m going to read next by one of two methods. First on recommendation (and here I’m lumping together reviews, word-of-mouth and book prizes) and second by looking at a book’s cover and deciding whether it, umm, speaks to me.

Which brings me to what I’d like to say about last year’s Man Booker Prize winner, Howard Jacobson’s The Finkler Question. I judged it by its cover and it fell short. Really. I picked it up in bookshops in both Auckland and London and speak to me it did not. The back cover mentions recently widowed men reminiscing in an apartment, a mugging outside a violin shop, and a change in a character’s sense of self. The front cover includes a coat rail, a hat and a coat. Neither did anything for me.  And then, of course, a panel of five literary types gave it a prize. But still I didn’t want to read it because the cover image was boring and the text on the back made me feel somehow removed from its topic.

In December, it arrived under my Christmas tree, wrapped and with a label bearing my name, so I read it and it is, of course, very good. It is about everything the back cover mentions. It’s about old blokes reminiscing, it’s about two widowers and one never-married wanna-be widower and their friendship. More than anything, it’s about anti-semitism and being Jewish. Granted, as a Pakeha kiwi girl of no particular religious background, had Bloomsbury put that on the back cover, I could still have said it had no personal relevance for me. But this is a book that deals with issues that we all think are important and relevant. It could be called The Gaza Question (though perhaps three old men discussing Gaza also sounds like a turn-off). It’s not. The Finkler Question is, as all the post-prize media suggested, very witty. Its characters are wonderfully, awkwardly human. The only point I can put my finger on that ties my feelings about the text into my feelings about the cover is that occasionally, like Jacobson’s main character Julian Treslove, I felt on the outer: unequipped to pass judgement on some of the issues raised (for example Finkler’s leadership of Jewish pro-Palestinian group ASHamed Jews). At times, I also wondered whether the traits described as quintessentially Jewish were described wholly in jest, half in jest or in all seriousness. But despite these feelings, and its dull cover, The Finkler Question won me over. While I was reading it, I wanted to have with me always so that I could whip it out and continue reading whenever a spare moment arose.

So what am I getting at? Is it that I should stop judging books by their covers? I don’t think so. As evidenced by my reticence to read The Finkler Question even post Booker win (often a prize win makes a book a sure thing in my eyes), the cover test is pretty important to me. There is something wonderful about standing in a bookshop surrounded by colour and design and finding myself drawn to a book. Maybe the e-book format will help with that, but until my reading becomes wholly Kindle-based (note to self: first buy a Kindle) I think a fair whack of my 1170 future reads will be chosen by their covers. Which probably means I’ll make a few mistakes, but also means my bookshelf will, at least in my own eyes, be quite, quite beautiful. I suppose the only real point I could say I’m making (though I’m not – I’ve only just thought it through) is that occasionally it might be worth buying someone a book you’ve enjoyed that they think they won’t like, just to see. Or perhaps don’t – after all, they’ve probably only got another 1000 books to read.